Obsessed: America's Food Addiction

by Mika Brzezinski

  But at the age of fifty, after I was downsized from the radio job and had my PBS work outsourced after ten successful years, I was shaken. And now I couldn’t even control my own body. I was fat and feeling miserable.

  It wasn’t easy for me to let go of the sunny personality I showed the world, but D’Mario let me see that I could, at least in the privacy of our training sessions. “I want you to let go of the pain and just believe,” he said. “That’s hard, but I want to help you see that this is just a stage of your life, and there is a lot more ahead for you.”

  So I started Mika’s challenge with new optimism. Little did I know that a major health crisis would derail my plan, and that I would spend months getting back on track. This journey was going to be a bumpy ride.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  FAT: WHOSE FAULT?

  MY STORY, WITH MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG,

  GOVERNOR CHRIS CHRISTIE, REBECCA PUHL,

  SENATOR CLAIRE MCCASKILL, DR. DAVID KATZ,

  DAVID KIRCHHOFF, FRANK BRUNI, GAYLE KING,

  DR. EMILY SENAY, LISA POWELL, DR. EZEKIEL EMANUEL,

  ASHLEY GEARHARDT, MICHAEL PRAGER, JOE SCARBOROUGH,

  BRIAN STELTER, DR. ROBERT LUSTIG, KIMBER STANHOPE,

  LEWIS CANTLEY

  Not long ago on Morning Joe, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg made a startling statement. “This year more people in the world will die of the complications of overweight than from starvation.”

  Have we all really turned into gluttons? Are we all poorly disciplined and lacking character? It just can’t be that our nation’s collective weight problem is entirely our fault as individuals. With so many Americans overweight, something else must be going on. Each of us may have our own challenges, but it is the nation that has an obesity crisis. As New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said, it is ignorant “to believe that being overweight is merely a function of willpower.”

  And yet that is just what we tend to think, says Yale researcher Rebecca Puhl. “The prevailing perception in our culture is that obesity is an issue of lack of willpower, lack of discipline, or personal responsibility.” Each one of us tends to think we are struggling alone.

  I’m convinced that a lot more is involved. To get to the root of the problem, we need to look hard in many directions. At the highly processed food that is so readily available. At the systems we have structured to make food that is laden with fat, sugar, and salt so much cheaper than wholesome foods. At the vending machines in school, hospital, and employee cafeterias where chips, candy, and soda are the only things available. At the limits of the labeling requirements we impose on food in stores and restaurants. At the look we consider healthy and beautiful, especially in our young girls. At how we talk about weight with one another.

  I can go on and on about the sources of the problem, because we have created a hydra-headed monster here. We’ve surrounded ourselves with unhealthy foods that we just can’t stop eating.

  Here is one shocking example: students consume almost 400 billion junk food calories at school every year according to Still Too Fat to Fight, a 2012 report by Mission: Readiness.1 That’s equal to almost 2 billion candy bars. (The report also notes that the weight of those candy bars is considerably more than the weight of the Midway, the longest-serving aircraft carrier in the US Navy.)

  At the same time, as few as 4 percent of high school students have the opportunity to take a daily gym class. We’re setting them up to become fat.

  Yes, of course we all need to take personal responsibility, but those kinds of statistics suggest we should be thinking differently about what that really means. It’s not just that we are responsible for getting our own weight under control, although that’s part of the solution. But we also need to think about the role each of us can play in initiating conversations that can change the whole society.

  “We can control our health care costs, we can control our national debt and our deficit if everybody in America would recognize obesity as the public health hazard that it has become,” declares Senator Claire McCaskill.

  We can control our health care costs, we can control our national debt and our deficit if everybody in America would recognize obesity as the public health hazard that it has become.

  —Senator Claire McCaskill

  To understand how we got here, let’s take a look at evolution and human biology.

  “The truth is, we are the first generation, or the second, where getting fat is the path of least resistance,” says David Katz, MD, director of the Yale Prevention Research Center and editor of the medical journal Childhood Obesity. “Throughout most of human history, people were struggling to get enough to eat.” For most Americans, that struggle is a thing of the past. “If you look at the food supply of the United States today versus, say, 1970, we have about five hundred to six hundred additional calories available per capita per day now than we did then,” explains David Kirchhoff, CEO of Weight Watchers. “Most of those new foods are coming with added sugars and fats, otherwise known as heavily processed foods and known in some quarters as junk food.”

  Our biology makes it hard to say no to junk food. We’re hardwired to go after the concentrated energy in high-calorie fats and sweets. Just look at me: I know that empty calories are the quickest route to unwanted pounds, and that’s the last thing I want. I know I’ll have to make up for an extra snack with an extra run. I’ve learned these lessons the hard way, and I’ve learned them over and over again. Yet what I know flies out the window when I see that bag of chips or that pint of ice cream; it’s as if my body is overriding my logic. There are days when I struggle not to pick up the fork.

  Same thing with Diane. She loses the battle more often than I do, yet she’s got more drive than most people I know. Her problem is not that she lacks discipline.

  What’s really going on here?

  “We’re simply not genetically programmed to refuse calories when they’re within arm’s reach.” That’s what Thomas Farley, New York City’s health commissioner, told New York Times columnist Frank Bruni. Bruni makes the case that America’s obesity crisis is partially the result of its prosperity and economic dominance. “Over the last century,” he writes, “we became expert at the mass production of crops like corn, soybeans and wheat—a positive development, for the most part.”2

  The less positive element in that equation is that America also became efficient at “processing those crops into salty, sweet, fatty, cheap, and addictive seductions,” Bruni explains. “Densely caloric and all-too-convenient food now envelops us, and many of us do what we’re chromosomally hardwired to, thanks to millenniums of feast-and-famine cycles. We devour it.”

  Densely caloric and all-too-convenient food now envelops us.—Frank Bruni

  Soda and sugary drinks are one of the worst culprits, providing the single largest source of calories in the American diet. We’re drinking twice as much of them as we did forty years ago. For many Americans, it’s all feast and no famine. We no longer need those stores of energy to keep us going through the lean times. Instead, the extra calories turn into fat.

  “We are products of our times,” says Yale’s David Katz. “Human character hasn’t changed, personal responsibility hasn’t changed, but the world has changed, and it’s a very obesigenic world.”

  One feature of that world is that food is everywhere, available 24/7, and marketed to the tune of some $36 billion per year. Yale’s Rudd Center reports that the fast food industry alone spends $4 billion in advertising yearly, much of it aimed at children.3 By comparison, for every dollar the industry spends pushing fast food, the US Department of Agriculture spends about one-tenth of a penny encouraging people to eat their vegetables.

  When there’s a downturn in the economy, those marketing dollars flow even more freely, and the stock prices of fast food companies often rise as they roll out offers like “dollar menus” and consumers perceive fast food meals as bargains. There is definitely a payoff in the corporate bottom line. Marketing dollars spent tra
nslates into food eaten. One survey by the Rudd Center showed that the week before it was conducted, 84 percent of parents had taken their child to a fast food restaurant.4

  I remember watching fast food ads when I was a kid, and I clearly remember that they sparked cravings in me. And I am certainly not the only one to hear the food marketers’ siren calls. My friend Gayle King, who co-hosts CBS This Morning, says she has never stopped being motivated by commercials. “You’re talking to somebody who saw a McRib commercial and left the house in the rain,” Gayle chuckles. “I put on some boots and took an umbrella because the McRib sandwich was a limited-time offer! So I went to McDonald’s in the rain, though the whole time I’m saying to myself, ‘Turn around. Turn around. Turn around.’”

  Supermarkets jump into the game, too, deliberately placing candy bars, sweet snacks, and sugary cereals where children will see them. “In most places, the bad food is about eye level of where the kids are,” points out Dr. Emily Senay, a Morning Joe regular who teaches in the Department of Preventive Health at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and is the medical correspondent for the PBS show Need to Know. “The candy, the chips, all that stuff is low enough in the store where they can easily see it. If you have little kids, it makes going out on a simple excursion a battle. The world we live in conspires against us when it comes to healthy eating.”

  Even if you avoid fast food chains and choose healthy foods in the market, eating out a lot is also asking for trouble because serving sizes in most restaurants have grown so dramatically in this country. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that restaurant portion sizes are more than four times larger now than they were in the 1950s.

  If portion sizes had increased overnight, says Lisa Powell, director of Nutrition at Canyon Ranch Health Resort in Tucson, Arizona, “people would be horrified. But it was just a little here, a little there, and our eyes got used to it and our stomachs got used to it. It makes me fear for people who are under thirty years old because it means they’ve never seen normal portions modeled.”

  The world that Dr. Katz calls “obesigenic” is also a place where takeout and packaged foods dominate, and healthy home cooking has become increasingly rare. A report led by Harvard University economists says that in the 1960s, “the bulk of food preparation was done by families that cooked their own food and ate it at home. Since then there has been a revolution in the mass preparation of food that is roughly comparable to the mass production revolution in manufactured goods that happened a century ago.”5

  In 1965, a married woman who didn’t work outside the home spent over two hours a day cooking meals and cleaning up afterward. By 1995, that same woman spent less than half that time in the kitchen. As we moved into the twenty-first century, those numbers fell even further. We spend less and less time preparing meals at home, and people eat more and more mass-produced foods. Cooking from scratch seems to have become a hobby for a small group of people and a chore that the rest of us no longer bother with.

  “My grandmother’s full-time job, basically, was to feed a big family, and she worked from morning till night,” says Canyon Ranch’s Lisa Powell. “In the sixties, women were beginning to enter the workforce, and the notion of convenience foods became popular. As our society changed, the environment was ripe for packaged and processed foods, which saved time. Today, you get your food out of a box or a can, you don’t have to think about it, you don’t have to mess with it, and you don’t have to touch it.”

  The less frequently we cook, the more we rely on mass-manufactured foods that are quick and easy to prepare. Most people aren’t giving much thought to what’s packed into them, but Powell certainly is. “Packaged food is high in salt, high in sugar, high in fat—all of those basic, primordial food preferences that people have. Seeking out salt, fat, and sugar ensured survival in previous eras, and we still have that same tendency.” The more we consume highly processed foods, she says, “the more our preferences have been directed that way, and we’ve lost the appreciation for fresh and whole food. The only thing that resonates with people is flavor and the intensity of flavor.”

  Along with passing up healthier foods for convenience, we have changed some of our basic customs. We no longer expect to eat three meals a day, sitting at a table with our families. In a family dinner setting, people can be more mindful of what they are eating and how much they are consuming. When meals are more “grab and go,” we end up doing a lot more grazing and snacking.

  “We don’t take time to eat,” said Lisa Powell. “We stuff in a sandwich at our desk and think we had lunch. We’ve lost that connection; we’ve just lost contact with the whole experience of eating. As a result, I think we’re not satisfied, so we’re looking for more and more and more and more.”

  We’ve just lost contact with the whole experience of eating. As a result, I think we’re not satisfied, so we’re looking for more and more and more and more.—Lisa Powell

  Then there’s the fact that social mores in America encourage eating just about everywhere. “If you go to Japan, it’s sort of socially prohibited to eat on the street,” says Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, a former White House advisor on health and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Zeke is also a Morning Joe regular. “People just don’t do it. It’s very different in America.”

  Price also plays a role. The fact is that eating nutritious food is more expensive than the alternative. “Compared to things like fresh fruits and vegetables, processed foods have a decreased price per calorie, and the economists will tell you that has a role,” Emanuel acknowledges.

  On top of that, our lives no longer require much physical activity. The kind of hard labor we used to do has been largely replaced by machines. We no longer walk to work; we drive. We have to deliberately seek opportunities to burn off calories because they are no longer built into everyday life, as they were for earlier generations. Put that together with today’s food environment and we begin to understand why we’ve gotten fat.

  “Everything about modern living that makes it modern is obesigenic,” says Katz. “The problem is a flood of highly processed, hyperpalatable, energy-dense, nutrient-diluted, glow-in-the-dark, bet-you-can’t-eat-just-one kind of foods” coupled with “wave after wave of technological advances giving us devices to do all the things muscles used to do.”

  The problem is a flood of highly processed, hyperpalatable, energy-dense, nutrient-diluted, glow-in-the-dark, bet-you-can’t-eat-just-one kind of foods.

  —David Katz

  That pretty much sums up why the American obesity crisis started about forty years ago. David Kirchhoff of Weight Watchers calls it “a perfect storm of overeating and under-exercising.”

  If my theory that some of us are addicted to unhealthy foods is confirmed by science, we’ll be able to understand a lot more about why we eat when we don’t want to. Ashley Gearhardt, PhD, a faculty member in the Department of Clinical Psychology at the University of Michigan, is a research pioneer in that area. When, as a graduate student at Yale University, she first began examining the possibility that food could be addictive, the very idea was mocked. Now, people are looking a lot more closely at the science that could explain food addiction, and her work is considered groundbreaking.

  Although we still need to understand the biology better, it is no longer fringe thinking to suggest that foods “jacked up in their level of sugar, fat, and salt are addictive to some people,” says Gearhardt. “I think one reason that people don’t take food addiction seriously is because we all need food to survive. But in looking at the obesity epidemic, you realize that it’s a certain type of food that shows this addictive potential.”

  The villain is no surprise: the food we call ultraprocessed, or highly palatable. Another term for it is junk food. It contains ingredients in quantities that are simply not natural to the body.

  Gearhardt’s research is built on well-accepted principles of addiction. As she explains it,
the addictive potential of any substance is based on two factors: the speed of its absorption into the body and the level of activation in the brain’s reward system. “If you look at a food that’s naturally occurring, like a banana, it has a decent amount of sugar in it, but it comes naturally packaged in a way that is high in fiber and high in other antioxidants that slow down the absorption of the sugar into our bloodstream,” she explains.

  Now, let’s compare that to a handful of jellybeans. There is more sugar in the candy, but more significantly, that sugar gets into the bloodstream a lot faster because it has no fiber or antioxidants. This means our response to the rewards in those jellybeans is a lot stronger than our response to the rewards in the banana—and that’s what can make a food addictive.

  “There are foods that are naturally elevated in sugar, like fruits, and there are foods that are naturally elevated in fat, like nuts and meats, but there are very, very few foods that are naturally elevated in both sugar and fat,” notes Gearhardt. “Just by combining sugar and fat, we’re creating a food that is abnormally rewarding.” That’s why we crave it. “So even though you know it’s causing you massive health issues and mental health concerns, you feel compelled to keep consuming it and really struggle to stop,” she says.

  Sounds a lot like a drug addict, doesn’t it?

  Besides fat, sugar, and salt, Gearhardt says other additives in foods, such as caffeine, have properties that make them potentially addictive. And caffeine sometimes shows up in places that the average consumer wouldn’t expect—like candy and chips. “If you are consuming caffeine in these products, you’re going to crave it a little more and feel a little more withdrawal when you stop eating it,” she says. Gearhardt’s research shows that a person eventually needs more of the processed food to get the same pleasurable response, another classic signal of addiction. In other words, if one handful of M&Ms is good, the whole package is better.